2012: A Retrospective of Stupidity, Part 1

Looking back on the almost-full-year of blogging we’ve done here at The Poor Sports, I’ve realized just how much idiocy was wandering around unsupervised in the realm of sports during 2012. Not only was there not a level-headed, legal adult nearby to try to limit the stupidity as much as possible, it was all different kinds of stupidity: I-have-n0-shame ignorance, I’ve-forgotten-the-rules nonsense, and I-can’t-watch-my-mouth-because-it’s-on-my-face absurdity, among others.

In the wake of the apocalypse fail, let’s celebrate the closing of 2012 with a year-in-review rewind of my Top 10 Dumbass Moments. Anyone who’s regularly followed The Poor Sports knows there were a ton of Dumbass of the Week posts, so there was a deep well of awesomeness from which to choose this list. I’ll be posting the first half of the countdown tonight, and the remainder will be up tomorrow, so make sure you check back to share in the memories of the dumbest of dumbasses.

On with the first half!

10. Joe Girardi (October 26th Winner): During Game 1 of the ALCS against the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees skipper opted to finally pull A-Rod, his third baseman, out of the game following a complete lack of production that surprised, well, no one. Typically benching a player is a coach or manager’s best tool for clearly indicating to that player that he needs to up his game or the team will move forward without his help. Apparently Girardi figured that A-Rod wouldn’t realize he was no longer being used in the line-up when he was told to stay seated rather than take his turn at the plate. Or that he wouldn’t notice he was still in the dugout when the rest of the team took the field for the top of the next inning. In fact, Girardi wanted to keep his substitution of Eric Chavez such a closely-guarded secret from Rodriguez that he called the public address announcer from the dugout and told him not to indicate the substitution in announcing Chavez’s at-bat. It must’ve worked too, because A-Rod chose to spend his time flirting with a woman in the stands rather than watching the game. Someone should let Girardi know that he’s so good at keeping secrets that A-Rod probably still doesn’t realize he was benched during that game, which is why he still hasn’t remembered which end of the bat he’s supposed to hold.

9. Metta World Peace (April 27th Winner): He who is known as World Peace has yet to live up to his name. Every once in a while it seems Metta feels some sort of implied insult to his masculinity has been issued and determines that the best way to make everything “right” in his world again is to show everyone what he thinks a real man does. What does a “real man” do, you ask? Throw unnecessary elbows into one of the best beards in professional sports. Oklahoma City’s James Harden took a fierce hit to the side of the head and went down hard. World Peace was tossed from the game with a flagrant 2 foul, and Harden took a minute or two to make sure his eyes were still facing the right way. Ouch. World Peace earns a spot on the countdown both for his pattern of behavior (Malice in the Palace anyone?) and for his attempts to explain his way out of punishment by having Ramon Sessions back him up when telling the ref his side of the story.

Reacting this way to being ejected for elbowing a man in the head is also a good way to earn yourself a special spot on this countdown. Careful man…it could freeze that way.

8. Melky Cabrera (August 24th Winner): Anymore, it seems like announcements of positive PED tests in the realm of professional sports have become almost blasé. It’s barely treated as breaking news anymore on ESPN. It takes quite a bit of creativity to stand out from the crowd of PED-using cheaters these days, and Melky Cabrera took that as a challenge. When it first came to light that Cabrera had tested positive for a synthetic testosterone substance, the story seemed as normal as a professional-athlete-got-caught-cheating story can be. Things took a turn for the loopy, though, with the introduction of a consultant named Juan Nunez who reportedly spent $10k to create a fake website meant to convince MLB that Cabrera had ordered a supplement and legitimately not known it contained a banned substance. The league quickly realized the website wasn’t real and handed down the standard 50-game suspension for a first time offender. Needless to say, Cabrera learned two lessons: cheating isn’t worth it and lying about cheating just makes you look stupid.

7. US Track & Field (June 29th Winner): The Olympic Trials for track and field took on a life of their own during the women’s 100m finals. The top three finishers qualified to represent the US in London. Simple enough, right? Apparently not. Jeneba Tarmoh and Allyson Felix tied for the third spot, putting the two women as well as the sport’s governing body in an odd spot. Under the current rules of UST&F, a tie in a race that determines the seeding of a future race is settled either by a run-off or a coin flip. The athletes involved in the tie (mostly) determine which option is used. If both athletes choose the same option, that’s the tie-breaking method used. If the athletes choose different options, the tie is settled with a run-off. If they refuse to choose, a coin flip is used.  Congrats to UST&F for having a tie-breaking contingency in place, but it seems to me that a time-based sport should have only one contingency: a race. Coin flips should be left to football officials determining possession and college students trying to figure out which fast food restaurant to hit up after closing down the bars.

6. Jim Schwartz (November 24th winner): Thanksgiving is a time for family, food, and football, and everyone has their traditions. One of the NFL’s traditions is a game in Detroit each year, and this year the Lions were unable to pull out the win (maybe not that surprising considering their past few seasons). How they lost, though, was more surprising. During the third quarter, the Texans ran the ball in for a TD that, under the current rules, would’ve been automatically reviewed and brought back since Houston’s RB was actually down on the far side of the 50-yard line. Unfortunately, Schwartz decided that the replay refs needed to be reminded they should be reviewing the play and threw his challenge flag. The appearance of that red flag automatically negated the review and awarded the Texans six points they shouldn’t have had…at least not on that play. Is it a questionable rule? Obviously, yes. It flies in the face of a coach’s instinct upon seeing what appears to be a bad call, and Schwartz fell victim to it only a week after Atlanta’s Mike Smith did the same thing (though his team managed a win). Is it still a rule? Yes, and Schwartz broke it. Instinct or not, he should be aware of the situations in which a coach is not allowed to challenge, especially one week after another coach lost an automatic review because he threw his red flag.

Check back in tomorrow for numbers 5 through 1!

One Flag, Two Flags, Red Flag, No Flag?

Now that I’ve awakened from turkey coma and survived the weirdest Black Friday I’ve ever worked, it’s time to sit down and award the Thanksgiving edition of the Dumbass of the Week Award. For those who are friends with me on Facebook, you already know the only game I watched Thursday was Houston at Detroit. I don’t have the NFL Network, and Washington at Dallas didn’t really catch my interest, so if I wanted to uphold the Thanksgiving = football tradition, the Texans/Lions game was my only other choice. While the game ended in a pretty ugly example of overtime football, play during regulation was reasonably good television. Detroit was putting up an impressive fight, and surprisingly it wasn’t the work of bad passes, dropped catches, or lost fumbles that can be blamed for their ninth Thanksgiving loss in a row.

I’m a firm believer that a loss shouldn’t be laid at the feet of a single player; sure a player might miss a buzzer-beater three pointer, or a kicker might go wide left (I’m looking at you, Gary Anderson, in your old-school helmet), but the reality is that an entire game is played before and/or after that singular play. Poor shot choices, dropped passes, dumb fouls, and costly penalties all impact the path of the rest of the game. There’s no doubt that some of those incompletions and penalties dictated the choices made by the Detroit Lions as the game progressed, but in this case a person could make a strong argument for, all else remaining the same, one person in one moment cost the Lions that win.

Who, you ask? Head coach Jim Schwartz. How? He threw his challenge flag. For those who were in charge of informing everyone else when Santa was coming down 34th Street so they could all come watch, were outside playing their own pick-up game, or were sent scrambling to the grocery store because someone forgot to buy the cranberry sauce, let me give you a rundown of the events.

In the third quarter, Detroit was leading 24-14 when Matt Schaub handed the ball off to RB Justin Forsett who scampered through the lines and headed forward only to meet two Detroit defensemen who attempted to bring him down. A split second later he popped back up and kept on running, a single Detroit player trying (and failing) to catch up with him as bolted the remaining distance to the goal line, appearing to score a touchdown 81 yards after being given the ball. Chaos ensued, both on the field and in my home. My husband and I immediately rewound the game and watched the tackle again and realized two things:

1. Forsett was undeniably, unarguably down at the 25-yard line. When they rolled the replays (5,497 times, of course) it was clear Forsett’s left elbow and knee made firm contact with ground. The play should have ended right at that point. It didn’t because…
2. The refs never blew the whistle. Without that obvious, audible signal, Forsett was given the freedom to jump back to his feet and take off for six points.

Now, under normal circumstances the initial shock of what had just occurred would give way to an automatic review (since it was a scoring play), and the guys up in the booth, provided they were different from last week’s winners, would have seen immediately that Forsett was down. The call would have been overturned, the ball would’ve come back to the far side 25-yard line, and Detroit’s defense would have had another chance to stop the Texans. Instead, Schwartz threw his challenge flag out onto the field. The result was Detroit getting slapped with a 15-yard unsportsmanlike penalty and the play not being reviewed.

If you’re like most football fans, hell most football players, that penalty and negated review sort of blew your mind (unless you watched last week’s Atlanta Falcons game when head coach Mike Smith committed the same error). So what really happened? When Schwartz threw a challenge flag on an automatically-reviewed play, the review gets taken away. In some ways, I suppose it’s meant to get the coaches to trust the way the game is now set up. Trust that, in an automatic review situation, the refs will make the right call. According to the NFL’s Dean Blandino, director of instant replay, the automatic review was created on scoring plays and turnovers to prevent teams from causing delays to the game in order to give their coaching staffs time to determine whether or not to challenge the previous play.

In other words, if this game had happened five years ago, it’s possible that a member of the Lions defense would have done something like obviously jumping offside prior to the snap of the ball. Doing so in a blatant manner would force the refs to throw the flag, and the lack of a snapped ball means the Lions would still be able to challenge Justin Forsett’s touchdown. To keep these actions to a minimum, the NFL opted to make turnovers and scoring plays automatically reviewed by the guys up in the booth, who will then give a “yay” or “nay” to the head official on the field as to whether or not play can continue.

The incentive for not throwing the flag on these types of plays? Having them reviewed and not getting hit with a penalty. This rule is applied so rarely that most people don’t even know it exists and therefore assumed Thursday’s snafu was the result of a new rule this season. Granted, it is very recent (having been created at the same time as the automatic review in 2011), but no, it wasn’t a new rule used to perpetuate Detroit’s Thanksgiving woes. Also recent was Mike Smith’s flubbing of this rule just last week. Why didn’t we hear about it as much as we’re hearing about Schwartz’s no-no? Smith’s Falcons ended up winning their game. Schwartz’s idiocy ended up allowing the Texans within one score of the Lions by way of a freebie TD.

Sure, a person can argue that even if the TD had been overturned, Schaub may have just continued to march his team down the field and scored anyway. Definitely a possibility, but if that scenario had occurred and the Lions still lost, they would’ve at least lost due to their own play (or lack thereof). Instead, their own coach lost his head, and they lost their game. His stupidity is even more ridiculous when one has to assume Smith’s slip-up last week served as a reminder to coaches league-wide not to challenge on scoring plays or turnovers. It’s part of their job as head coaches to know these rules, and Schwartz just demonstrated that his awareness of those rules is a bit shaky. During the replays, you can even see he had to wait until a ref explained it to him before he began his “That’s on me” explanations to his team.

A few final things to consider:

• The on-field refs played it the right way despite some people’s claims they should be fined or otherwise punished for not blowing the whistle when Forsett was tackled. When you watch the play develop in real-time, it’s entirely possible that the closest ref to the tackle wasn’t in the best spot to see whether or not Forsett was actually down (I was certainly questioning it–doesn’t happen often, but players have landed on defenders in such a way that keeps themselves from touching the ground). Running plays are unpredictable at best due to the cuts, speed, and fake-outs of a RB. Refs aren’t always going to be in the right place at the exact right moment. If you think about it, had they blown the whistle and Forsett not actually been down, there would’ve been no way to challenge or reverse that call. Houston simply would’ve been out of luck on that particular play. By letting him continue to run, the refs were allowing for the best possible outcome of the play: if he scored, the automatic review process would allow for an overturn and play continues as it should.
• Kudos to Justin Forsett for having the awareness to continue running when he realized no whistle had been blown. Since a ref’s whistle signals the end of a play, and not the assumptions of the players on the field, Forsett simply took advantage of a moment. It’s an awareness I would hope most NFL players have, though judging by the lack of action on the part all but one Lions defensemen, it’s apparently not.

In the end, everything happened according to the rule book. Is it stupid to negate a review when a coach throws a challenge flag in the heat of the moment? Quite possibly. Is the reasoning behind the rule logical? Sure, it seems that way to some degree, and the NFL Competition Committee has said it will review the rule which may lead to a mid-season or post-season rule change. Either way, the only person who made a mistake that couldn’t have been fixed by following the rules was Jim Schwartz. He says he was aware he couldn’t challenge the play, but “overreacted.” For doing something he knew was against the rules, Schwartz is this week’s big winner.

Congrats, Idiot.

Thanksgiving games are an iconic part of the NFL schedule, and the Lions have been part of that tradition since the beginning. There are a few moments that rise above the holiday on which the game is played to become lasting memories and trivia answers. Jim Schwartz can now say he breathes the same rarefied air as Leon Lett. The holiday season is the time for nostalgic memories, or something, isn’t it? Enjoy.

PS–The cast of characters here reads like a who’s who. For Dallas: Jimmy Johnson, Troy Aikman, Jason Garrett (Troy’s backup), Emmitt Smith, Moose, and Michael Irvin. For Miami: Don Shula, Mean Joe Greene (D-Line Coach), Pete Stoyanovich, and Mike Golic (Dan Marino was hurt…blew his Achilles in Week 5). Oh, and by the way, the man announcing the result of that play? Ed Hochuli–his explanation length hasn’t changed much has it? Of course…those biceps have.